Around the Homestead

Yesterday it was cold and rainy.  We even got some sleet and hail.  I was still taking pain pills from the oral surgery I had on Friday so I stayed home from work.  While I was working, my wife and son went and put up some pallets for a compost bin as our current one is cooking pretty good and we want it to break down as quickly as possible.  They did a pretty good job of it too.

Today my wife and my son also made survival cookies filled with apple preserves.  We believe that Jake should be able to cook so this was a good exercise in baking.  Really the cookies are oatmeal cookies, and they really are filled with apple preserves... and boy did they come out great!!!

Stopped by the dark

Yesterday I was hoping we would get both the rafters and the sheeting up for the roof.  We got stopped by the setting sun.  We got the rafters all up but by the time they were up the sun was setting and it would have been too dark to secure the OSB sheets on top of them. 

While we were out there Trudy found an egg in the chicken run. 

 Notice what's odd about the egg?  There's no hard shell around it.  Just the thin membrane.  This happens sometimes but it's the first we've seen since we had chickens. 

Well, back to the pictures of the project...

The dog had to come check out the progress.

So did the cat

We ended the night with this.

The OSB and the roofing will go on tomorrow(Saturday)

Progress

After I got home from work Jake and I got 2 more half walls framed out on his fort.  I tomorrow we'll put the siding on them.  I have to make a couple of half walls on the side the steps are on, but I think we'll get the siding on the other 3 sides, and make those out of scrap... I don't want to have to buy anymore material if I don't have to.  If I can get the siding on tomorrow then we're going to put the roof framing and sheets up on Wednesday after work, the wind is supposed to die down by then.  I wouldn't have wanted to be moving sheets on the roof with 35mph gusts like there was today.  No pictures today, hopefully I can make up for it tomorrow.

I sure have had fun on this project.  I've also decided that when this is done, I'm gonna enlist my son and we're going to build a goat shed, a pen and a milking stanchion.  I'm going to build it out of as much recycled material as possible.  Probably a lot of pallet wood.

So far on the blog I've talked a lot about this one project and a bit about my garden.  That's gonna change soon and I'll talk about other projects, sustainability, why I choose to homestead, and preparing for the future as well.

Things accomplished Today

First the things we got accomplished today.  Jake and I got out and continued on the project today.  We got the other part of the floor on the Fort then we finished putting the stops in the trap door so it can be walked on safely.  Once we finished that we got two of the posts up that will support the roof.    Here's a picture of where' we're at.  I have to cut those posts down, but, I should have the walls in tomorrow and maybe start roofing. 

Forgive the thumbs my son took the picture.

It got too hot out there today, when I came in it was 93 degrees.

Fun Day Today

Today I normally work from home but truthfully I needed a break from work.  So I scheduled a vacation day.  This morning I was lazy and loafed until 10 or so, then we went to take a tour of a local cave turned tourist attraction for a homeschool field trip.  That was fun.  

We got home from that at about 2:30 and ate some homemade strawberry ice cream.  My favorite!! After the ice cream was eaten we had lunch, then Jake and I resumed work on rebuilding the fort.  The corner posts that extend past the platform and we toyed with raising the platform up to the top of the posts, but in the end we decided not to.  Jake also wanted a trap door in it so we spent most of the day making the 'escape hatch', I work slow so we only got that done and one side of the floor put on.  I'm not sure if we'll get anything done to the fort tomorrow, but Sunday we should get a lot done.  Below are pics of what we got done today.

That's it for tonight...